SA is technically in a third wave, says National institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) Executive Director, Professor Adrian Puren.
CAPE TOWN – SA is technically in a third wave, says National institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) Executive Director, Prof. Adrian Puren.
On Wednesday, the country recorded the highest number of new coronavirus infections in more than four months indicating that the country was officially entering the third wave.
Speaking on SABC’s Morning Live, Puren said technically the situation in the country could be described as a third wave as the whole country had reached the threshold.
“The overall positivity is at 12.7% nationally, but if you could allocate it by province the positive rate could be higher. In Gauteng it’s about 17 %, Free State is about 15%, Northern Cape 23%, North West 18%. So that really means we should really enhance our testing and identity cases in order to get a better sense of the current outbreak in South Africa,” he said.
The country recorded an increase of 5 782 new cases and 110 Covid-19 related deaths yesterday, taking the total number of cases to date to 1 675 013. The new infections came from 45 484 tests.
There were also 110 new Covid-19 related deaths recorded in the past 24 hours. Of these, nearly half (54) were in Gauteng, 16 were in the North West, 11 were in Limpopo, seven were in the Northern Cape, four each in both KZN and Mpumalanga and three in the Western Cape.
The South African Covid-19 Modelling Consortium Epidemic Explorer showed that daily hospital admissions have increased in four provinces.
Average hospital admissions in the last week was also up with the Free State showing a 75% increase, Gauteng, 32%, Northern Cape 55% and the North West, 46%.
